Rep. Gerald McCormick, R-Chattanooga, the House majority leader, and seven other Republican members of the House have released a letter blasting Tennessee's retention elections and saying, "Tennessee's Judiciary has always been political."

The letter comes just days after the Davidson County grand jury called for further investigation over the validity of the state's Judicial Performance Evaluation Commission.

McCormick blasts the state's Tennessee Plan for the selection and retention of appellate court judges, which was instituted in 1971 and modeled after the Missouri Plan, a 1947 amendment that Missouri voters approved to their state's constitution.

"While the Missouri Plan was created with the hopes of insulating judges from politics, and travels under the false front of 'merit selection,' it has instead transferred power to state bar associations while shielding the selection process from public scrutiny," the letter quotes from a Wall Street Journal article.

"As demonstrated in a June 24, 2014, state senate hearing, the result has been a selection process dominated by partisan politics where only a chosen few have any input into who rules the powerful judicial branch of Tennessee's government," McCormick writes.

JPEC criticized

The majority leader criticized the JPEC, which is responsible for recommending whether incumbent judges can stand for an unopposed retention election, for essentially being a rubber stamp.

"The JPEC literally determines which judges we citizens have the opportunity to vote for by weeding out the bad judges and keeping the good judges," McCormick says.

"The only problem is that the JPEC, in its entire history, has never found a bad judge. After the June 24th hearing, chaired by Sen. Mike Bell, we know why. The system is rigged so that no judge ever loses his or her job."

McCormick's letter takes a similar tack to the June 24th Senate Government Operations Committee hearing orchestrated by Sen. Mike Bell, R-Riceville, which probed whether Supreme Court Chief Justice Gary Wade was attempting to influence the JPEC after it voted in an October preliminary vote, to "not retain" three appellate judges.

Bell, a close ally of Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey, R-Blountville, was the source of an inquiry to the Board of Judicial Conduct about Wade's behavior. The board found no violations of the Judicial Code of Conduct by the chief justice.

Both the JPEC and the BJC were called before Bell's committee to justify their actions.

Elections coming soon

The letter was released less than a month before the August 7 retention elections, where Ramsey has vowed to see the incumbent supreme court justices defeated.

To drum up support for his effort, Ramsey began pitching Tennessee business leaders in April. Earlier this week, he told some Republican lawmakers that he has raised $1 million and plans to start spending it soon.

"Beware of those who say they want to keep the judiciary independent and free from politics," McCormick wrote. "If it had been free from politics, why has every single Attorney General chosen by the Supreme Court since Reconstruction been a Democrat? And why have only three of the 22 Supreme Court justices serving in the last forty years been Republicans?"